June 1, 2025

Acts 16:16-34; John 17:20-26

Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them.

This is an interesting message. Of course, the love of God for us all is important. The love we have for God is important. And the love we have for one another is certainly important. But Jesus began this prayer, for it is a prayer by Jesus to God, with the statement that the world does not know you. The world does not know God. And that is quite interesting to me.

Because, in many respects, we do not know God. Even in a world flooded with religions and religious people, the world does not really know God. We have ideas about God, but we do not know much if anything about God. Know as in having knowledge of God, perceptions of God.

There are examples in the Bible of people speaking with God, but those are few. More often people are speaking on behalf of God. They had had some message delivered to them through dreams or intermediaries. Occasionally there is a messenger from God such as when Mary was visited by the angel Gabriel announcing that she was with child.

And yet these are generally not personal contacts with God. You have to go back to the Book of Genesis with Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, to have someone speaking directly to God. Even Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, only encounters God in dreams. Moses only saw representations of God, in the burning bush, in the fire and clouds upon the mountain.

God is a mystery in many ways, a mystery being something impossible or difficult to understand. Which begs the question, are we really supposed to understand God?

Even the name of God is mysterious. “God” is not the name of God, by the way. It is a way of referring to God but it is not a personal name. God is basically a pronoun, a word standing in for something else. So, what should we call God, other than God?

There are seven names of God in the Jewish tradition. These are words used when someone is invoking the name of God. They are Adonai, El, Elohim, Shaddai, and Tzevaot. There is the phrase “I am that I am,” and lastly there is the name known as the Tetragrammaton.

In the Christian tradition, particularly among English speakers, we do not always hear these words in translations of the Bible. For example, Adonai is generally read as “My Lord.” Adonai is also used as a placeholder name for when the word used is not supposed to be said out loud, because you are not supposed to say a specific name of God. We’ll come back to that.

The term “El” is ancient. Long ago, it was the name of a god, small “g,” from another Middle Eastern tradition known as Ugaritic. But over time it came to mean “god” in the generic sense. So “El” is god or God.

We often encounter the name “El” in unexpected places. Most names that end in “el” are references to God. For example, the name Gabriel could be translated as the “hero of God.” Michael means “who is like God.” Samuel means “God has heard.”

Elohim derives from the same root as “el,” but it is plural. But it is more than a simple plural, for it implies something more than more than one. It is often used as a superlative, like the “God of all gods.” That word however suggests that God is one of many.

We do not often see that subtlety translated into English, but there was a time when God in the Bible was considered the greatest of the gods, not the only God in existence. The idea of monotheism developed many centuries after the Hebrew scriptures were written. That sermon can wait for another Sunday.

“Shaddai” is usually translated as God Almighty. This may have been a name for an old god that became synonymous with being almighty. Again, we do not hear this word “Shaddai” often on Sunday mornings because saying God Almighty or the Almighty One is more common.

Tzevaot is also not a frequent flyer. It literally means “armies” but is more often rendered as “Lord of Hosts.” This is often heard in the Book of Psalms or in the tumultuous books of the Bible when the armies of Israel are constantly at war.

“I am that I am,” is a phrase as much as it is a name. It was what God called himself when he spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai. Ancient Hebrew is a little tricky when it comes to the verb to be, however, so this phrase could be translated as “I am that I am” or “I will be what I will be” or even “I will be because I will be.” If that strikes anyone as mysterious, I would agree. And again, I ask the question, are we really supposed to understand God?

The most mysterious name of God is the Tetragrammaton. That is the name of God rendered as YHWH. That is a name that some religious traditions do not permit you to say. When you see that word in the Bible and if you are reading out loud, you are supposed to swap in another word like “Adonai.” However, we are not one of those traditions, so I can say Yahweh with only a slight worry about stray lightning bolts.

One unusual characteristic of Ancient Hebrew is that there were no letters signifying vowels, like A, E, I, O, or U. You were supposed to know those particular sounds in context. You would have learned them from other people reading the words aloud. Symbols for Hebrew vowels, a series of dashes and dots, did not come into being until about the year 700.

Which brings up an interesting possibility. The vowels that are traditionally used to pronounce the true name of God are passed down to us. However, that means that they had not been written down for many, many years. These sounds were only passed along through oral tradition for well over a thousand years, long before the day they were first written. So, there is a question: do we truly know if this is the name of God?

This would not be the first time mistakes were made with the name of God. You are probably familiar with the word “Jehovah.” That is how the name of God was translated into Middle English, which was more like German than modern English. Because no vowels were written down, Christian writers had to make a guess about them. Why guess? Because they were not exactly friendly with the Jewish communities of the medieval period, having driven them out of most of Europe.

These Christian translators took various liberties with the name of God. They switched in other consonants because the “y” sound is not common in Germanic languages. “W” can also be spoken like the letter “v” in English. Therefore, you ended up with Jehovah, bearing only glancing resemblance to its Hebrew origins.

You might at this point be looking at your watch thinking, who really cares? The name “God” is sufficient for everyday purposes. Why spend all this time wrangling over language?

I would mostly agree with this sentiment. Getting too hung up on language can be bothersome, even annoying. The purpose of language is to convey a common understanding of ideas among people. As long as we know what is being discussed, why worry about the nitty gritty? Again, I generally agree.

Now let me run a certain sentence by you to see if you retain a common understanding about what is being said: “Our Mother who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

And please be assured, I am not planning on amending the Lord’s Prayer. The text of the prayer comes from the Gospel of Matthew and the author specifically used the word “father” not “mother.” I also say that pray automatically in my head, so I am enough of a traditionalist to go with that particular flow.

Mind you, the important thing to remember about the Lord’s Prayer is that the prayer was intended by Jesus as a simple example of how to pray without getting to caught up with flowery language, showy repetition, or thick theology. Pray simply, pray without concern for how you look, pray to yourself rather than for public display.

And in this prayer, Jesus prayed to God the Father. However, that does not mean that if you were to pray to God in a different way, with a different name, that such prayers would be somehow invalid. I am confident that God cares more about sentiments than semantics.

How do you pray to God? Is it in church, hearing and responding to the familiar words of our prayerbook? Is it at home, maybe at bedtime, praying for those in our hearts and minds? Is it when you are walking around outside in nature, in the deep greens of the forest or by the roaring waves of the seashore? Is it when you are at rest or when you are in great need?

When I was growing up, prayers were very specific, very traditional formulas repeated again and again. The primary prayers were the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be. That last one goes “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen” The “Hail Mary” goes “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

These three prayers together make up the rosary, which is a discipline of prayer that involves repeating prayers in a certain order. Usually it is one Lord’s Prayer, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory Be. If you have ever seen a set of rosary beads, you would notice three sets of ten beads separated by a single bead. You say these sets of prayers three times and that is a full rosary. Sometimes there are additional prayers added, but those new-fangled prayers were not in my childhood practice, so they are news to me.

Mary is not a major figure in most Protestant traditions. For Catholics however there are figures to whom prayers are lifted up as intercessors, as go-betweens with God. Look around the room at the saints in the windows. You prayed to Saint Christopher, for example, to guide someone safely home while they were away traveling. You prayed to Saint Anthony when something, or someone, was lost to you. My father told me that he offers prayers to Saint Pope John Paul II, who is the patron saint of Parkinson’s disease. And my father is confident that this has helped alleviate his symptoms for ten years.

Mary is considered the greatest of all the intercessors. She is a big gun and as such many devote themselves in prayer to her. Some might argue that this primary role should belong to Jesus, but someone might then counter how do you intercede with yourself, for Jesus is a part of God.

Again, God is mysterious. Is God simply God or is God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? The Trinity is a way of understanding the complexities of God even though it may not seem to be terribly understandable. Our own name “Unitarian” suggests that our ancestors took issue with the notion of the Trinity, which is somewhat true.

Christian Unitarians did not dispute any one of the elements of the Trinity: Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. They objected to this organization of the concept of God because it is not Biblically based—and it really is not but I am not one to spend much energy on the topic. The notion of the Trinity attempts to declare truths about God and the nature of God. And it is enough for me to say that such knowledge is simply beyond the ability of human beings to understand. But people try hard to prove otherwise.

For example, there are various efforts to describe God in the Bible. Some are complicated. Some are weird. My favorite version is in one of the letters of the New Testament, one we rarely hear on Sunday morning. That is not because of me, by the way, but because some texts are not frequently in the rotation of readings. Some of these letters are considered to be too “Catholic” by Protestants, some of whom organized our list of annual readings back in the 1990s.

In the First Letter of John, chapter 4, verse 8: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” The author goes on to say: “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. Complete in us and complete through us. And if that seems to suggest that God somehow needs us to reach into the world, it is worth considering. People often lament about how the world is a mess, how bad things happen to good people and how good things happen for bad people. True, true, and true.

 

But if we consider the words of John, who is not John who wrote the Gospel by the way. If we consider these words, if we take them truly to heart, we might better understand why the world is a mess and why good and bad things seem to fall in the wrong places.

We allow the world to be a mess. We allow bad things to happen to good people. We allow good things to happen for bad people. The world is a mess because we are stingy with our love for the world and one another. When you think of the troubles of the world, what are they?

Poverty? We allow that. Hunger? We allow that. War? We allow that. We allow all of that.

What about those bad things happening to good people? Diseases come to mind. And those are terrible circumstances. But I think these are not the fault of God. God does not sit up in heaven doling out cancer or viruses. It is in the nature of this world and the nature of our bodies. Our bodies are minor miracles that will eventually break down. Our cells replicate over and over and in time something will go wrong with that process.

Why can’t God make it all better, you might ask. God gave us the world around us. God gave us life itself. Are we then asking God for another helping of miracles? The world around us hums along remarkably and, yes, within that wonderous system things eventually break down. That is the fundamental nature of the world and the fundamental nature of our lives.

We were also given clever minds and nimble fingers. We were given the ability to solve many of these problems on our own. Also, we sometimes do not know enough to get out of own way. Some people would reject the medicines that have saved untold millions of lives. Some would make it harder to share all those medical miracles widely with those suffering. In such a world, good people might suffer and bad people might prosper.

Remember that line from John: God is love. I like that phrase and I place a lot of emphasis on this fundamental idea from the scriptures. And I also consider the obverse of this line to be important as well. If God is love, then to some degree love is God.

And if love is God, the absence of love is something else. The absence of love is not the absence of God but perhaps the incompleteness of God’s love or more likely the frustration of God’s love. Frustration because we are getting in the way. We are the short circuit in the system.

There may be any number of reasons we might offer for why we are less loving to certain people, less willing to offer of ourselves in loving kindness to the world. There could be economic reasons or policy reasons. There could be reasons of traditions or culture. There could be longstanding disputes between peoples and nations. All of that could be the case. All of that could be true. And absolutely none of it matters.

The excuses of the world have no meaning in heaven. The true question is: did you do all that you could to love one another? If yes, great. If no, the love of God has been blocked, rejected, frustrated by the emotions and grudges of human beings. We have not understood God or what God wants from us.

One of the lines I often read to begin our service is “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my father in heaven.” That line comes directly from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. Not everyone that says the name of God, that prays to the name of God shall enter into the kingdom of heaven. But the one who does the will of my father in heaven.

And Jesus told us the will of God. He told us that again and again. And one of the later disciples, John, went even a step further. Not only does God want us to love one another, but God is love itself. So, when you do not love, you not only block God from enter into the life of someone else, you block God from entering into yourself.

If you are someone who would seek to have the love of God enter into your life, then let the love of God enter your heart and let the love of God pass through you into the world. For God is love and love is God. All the rest, is detail. All the rest is distraction. All the rest is not God. Amen.

 

 

 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.